Wednesday, August 12, 2015

We’re sad to say that due to regulators another region has had to be blocked from LocalBitcoins. From today onwards users from New York are no longer allowed to use LocalBitcoins because of the legislation known as the BitLicense (23 NYCRR 200) which makes it a federal offense to sell virtual currency to people living in New York unless you have applied for the license.

This new regulation would require anyone selling Bitcoins through our service to acquire the BitLicense if they sell Bitcoins to residents of New York. As the Bitlicense is time consuming, expensive and difficult to obtain for anything but large companies we’ve taken the decision to protect our US based traders and not allow New York based users to use our service.

If you reside in the US, you will get a one-time pop up notification requiring you to confirm whether or not you live in New York. All new users will equally have to answer the same question.

This is an unfortunate state of affairs and we hope that the regulation will in the future accommodate small time bitcoin sellers who do not have the possibility to comply with regulations made for big financial institutions.